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After the Beer Summit

You’re a Harvard professor and a scholar of African-American literature; what led you to undertake your new PBS series, “Faces of America,” in which you research the ancestry and genetic makeup of a dozen mostly white celebrities, including Meryl Streep and Stephen Colbert? In 2006, when we first aired the series “African American Lives,” I got a huge response. A woman wrote to me and said, “I like the series, but why don’t you trace someone like me, who is of Russian-Jewish descent”? I thought that was a great idea.

I’m concerned that your new series reduces history to a game of celebrity DNA. I use celebrities to attract an audience so we can teach people about genetics and genealogy. I want people to watch.

But how does it advance our understanding of race in America to know that the genetic makeup of Stephen Colbert turns out to be 100 percent European or white? We discovered to Stephen’s enormous surprise that he was not only descended from Irish Catholic ancestors, but from German Lutheran ancestors as well. Diversity doesn’t mean black and white only.

Have you noticed the newfound “cousins” in the news every day? Like President Obama and the new Republican senator of Massachusetts, Scott Brown, who are supposedly 10th cousins?Yes, I wish they had discovered their familial link before Scott Brown joined the Republican Party.

You announced recently that the television host George Stephanopoulos and Hillary Clinton are likely cousins. That’s silly. But it’s not. If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you’re related to them. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it’s fascinating.

Why is it meaningful? We all share DNA and are related to one another if you look back far enough in time. It’s one thing to say that you and I are descended from some people walking around in East Africa 50,000 years ago. It’s another thing to say there’s an actual human being who lived in the last few hundred years and we could even give a name to this guy and we share his DNA.

Photo

Credit
Michael Prince for The New York Times

Why do people call you Skip? My mom, God rest her soul — she liked nicknames. In the womb she named me Skip. There was another black guy in Piedmont, W.Va., and his name was Skip. They called him Big Skip, and I was Little Skip.

Skip sounds so WASPy.Hey, you know, I don’t think we knew what a WASP was. I didn’t realize it until I went to Yale as a student and met Chip and Muffy and — actually, I thought Skip was a black name.

You were catapulted into the headlines last July after you were arrested at your home in Cambridge, Mass., and President Obama publicly said, “Skip Gates is a friend.” When did you first meet the president? When he was running for the Senate. The first party for him on Martha’s Vineyard was held in the house I lease.

Have you seen James Crowley, the Cambridge Police sergeant who arrested you, since you sat down with him and the president and reconciled over beers?Yes. We had a drink at my favorite pub in Cambridge. We met at the River Gods cafe several months ago, and he gave me the handcuffs.

The handcuffs that you are wearing in that disturbing photograph of you held captive on your front porch? Yes.

He gave them to you to keep? I donated them to the new National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian.

It’s odd that you will be remembered in connection with a pair of handcuffs when you’re hardly a rabble rouser. Would you agree? No one would exactly call me Malcolm X. And I don’t think as time goes on that I will be remembered for handcuffs. I hope not.